Interviewer: what is more important: getting on with your colleagues or ensuring your employer maximises shareholder wealth?
Candidate (suppressed shock manifesting as a rictus): er, I guess I would say they’re not mutually exclusive things?
Interviewer: imagine that they are, hypothetically speaking.
Candidate (puzzled expression): well, on a purely hypothetical basis, I would say…maximising shareholder wealth is more important.
Interviewer: okay, and what if maximising shareholder wealth required you to terminate your colleagues?
Candidate: do you mean terminate the employment of my colleagues?
Interviewer: no, I mean actually end the lives of those colleagues. Of course, their employment would also naturally come to an end as well. So in a sense, you would simultaneously be terminating their employment. (The interviewer laughs in the shrill manner of a little girl.)
Candidate (wipes the sweat from his brow, shifts the weight from one buttock to the other in his chair): well, obviously, since murder is illegal -
Interviewer (holds a hand up with the vigour of a traffic cop stopping traffic): assume it isn’t illegal, hypothetically speaking.
Candidate (staring intently at the glass panel behind the interviewer, as if imagining there is a panel of HR observers on the other side, which there is, of course.) Assuming it isn’t illegal?
Interviewer: uh-huh.
Candidate: well then I guess I would be prepared to murder one or two colleagues in the name of shareholder wealth maximisation.
(The interviewer writes something in his notebook. His face evinces zero about what he made of the candidate’s answer.)
Interviewer: another hypothetical - one of your direct reports informs you they have uncovered a pervasive financial statement fraud. If you report it, your employer’s share price will tank. If you let sleeping dogs lie, however, the share price will continue its dizzying ascent.
Candidate: until it craters when the full extent of the fraud is laid bare.
Interviewer: assume that most financial statement frauds are actually good for shareholders, that is, they juice returns by a significant alpha and are rarely uncovered.
Candidate (inhales through his nose ostentatiously, strokes chin, thinks): okay, well in this highly contrived situation, I suppose I would tell my direct report to keep their suspicions to themself and delete any incriminating evidence.
Interviewer: and suppose the direct report refuses point blank to do that, threatens to blow the whistle as it were?
Candidate: naturally, I would impress upon my direct report that such an action would be foolish in the extreme.
Interviewer: and if that had no effect whatsoever?
Candidate: just to clarify: murder is still hypothetically legal, correct? (The interviewer nods that it is.) Okay, in that case, I would have no choice but to terminate the direct report.
(The interviewer writes something in his notebook. His face is the kind of inscrutable one associates with a surfeit of Botox.)
Interviewer: change of tack. The following questions should be answered with a yes / no answer. No ‘maybes’, no ‘not sures’, no ‘it depends’?
Candidate: got it.
Interviewer: ready?
(The candidate nods apprehensively.)
Interviewer: would you do pretty much anything if the company told you it was the right thing to do?
Candidate: yes.
Interviewer: do you agree that capitalism is the only viable economic system there is?
Candidate: yes.
Interviewer: do you think corporate hierarchies serve a useful purpose?
Candidate: yes.
Interviewer: do you agree that the company’s values are sacrosanct?
Candidate: yes.
(The interviewer closes his notebook, looks at the candidate with circumspection.)
Interviewer: thank you for your time today. Do you have any questions for me?
Candidate: no, no questions.
Interviewer: very well.
The interviewer sees the candidate out and then joins the panel of HR observers for an interview debrief. After many hours of strenuous debate, they are unanimous in their assessment: the candidate is a little rough around the edges but clearly has potential, a definite maybe in other words.